You may have heard that email marketing is dying but that’s not exactly true. In fact, it remains one of the most effective ways of growing your SaaS business.
Today, we’re diving deeper into the topic. We’re about to show you exactly how SaaS email marketing is different and how it can help you grow your business.
Sounds good? Let’s begin.
What Is Email Marketing for SaaS Business?
Email marketing in SaaS is special in its own way.
An e-commerce store will use email marketing to push its clients from the top to the bottom of the funnel. Once the purchase of a product takes place, the goal is reached. It’s a journey from point A to point B.
Meanwhile, in SaaS, funnels are replaced by customer life cycles. Reaching users through their mailboxes is essential to keep these cycles alive. Email marketing in this industry has the goal of repeatedly pushing the customers through the same process of re-subscribing to your solution.
Subscriptions are the keyword here. Email marketing for SaaS businesses doesn’t stop at selling once. Instead, it drives your business’s monthly and annual recurring revenue by repeating the sales process and upselling with the same customers. It’s not just about getting them to the checkout – but also about preventing them from leaving you.
Source: Posmay
Do You Really Need an Email Marketing to Grow?
Technically speaking, if you find another working acquisition and retention channel for your SaaS business, then you have a chance at getting away without email marketing.
There are, after all, a plethora of different ways to reach your customers – such as messengers, ads or cold calling. And some marketers believe that younger generations will prefer other means of communication.
The vast majority of marketers, however, disagree. Email marketing works particularly well for corporations and businesses where email is still the primary way to communicate online. In fact, according to BlueCore, 72% of generation X consider email marketing the most personal way of client communication. And 64% of Millenials agree with this statement.
On top of that, Campaign Monitor has discovered that in the SaaS industry, email marketing can show off a nearly 23% open rate – which is much lower in, for example, retail.
To simplify it: you could, theoretically, give up on email marketing for your SaaS business. But ask yourself if you really want to miss out on the opportunity that is here.
How Email Marketing Can Help Your SaaS Business Grow?
Email marketing in the SaaS business isn’t only alive and well, but it also comes with a bunch of benefits. While all of them come down to helping your business grow, it happens in multiple ways.
Lead Generation
Email marketing can be a powerful lead generation tool through your blog and the resources you share online. If you get decent traffic from search engines, you can capture it by collecting emails of potential users and including them in your campaigns.
Churn Reduction
Email marketing is an amazing way to reduce churn. Send out customized onboarding campaigns, get in touch with inactive users and change the minds of those about to leave you.
Brand Building
Email marketing is an effective way to work on your branding and establish authority in your niche. Use its personalized messaging to show your customers you know exactly what you’re talking about – and how can you help them.
Nurturing Customer Relations & Customer Marketing
Email marketing simplifies nurturing relationships with your clients – by gathering their feedback, announcing new features or simply hearing them out. Your message lands directly in front of them, and you won’t get a better opportunity than that.
Reach Customers Cheaply
Email marketing is very cost-effective. Not only can you automate it, saving yourself manual work, but the email marketing platforms are also quite affordable. In many cases, email marketing can be a cheaper and more effective alternative to ads.
Customer Education
Educating your customers on how your brand can help them is essential to keeping them around. They may not follow your other channels, but a catchy subject line with a great promise will surely entice them to hear more from you.
Promote Your Other Services
Launching a side project? Use email marketing to give it an easier start and contact people who are already on your email list.
Understanding Your Audience
Conversations you can have with your audience could change your business entirely, so don’t miss out on this opportunity. Understanding your users is key to giving them exactly what they need.
Increase Conversion Rates
Email marketing is your go-to strategy for turning trials into paid users. A well-designed drip campaign can convince those who still hesitate. Don’t leave your free users just hanging around – actively send them messages to stay in touch.
Source: Klood
Upselling Opportunities
Users who already purchased your solutions are more likely than others to do it again. Even more so, they’re more likely to upgrade. Email marketing is a great way to contact this exact group of people and try to hook them up on more awesome services that will help them grow.
Saving Time
Cold calling is time-consuming, but email marketing is not. It can be automated and the messages go out on their own. All you need to spend time on is to create an alluring campaign and decide on the fitting schedule.
Customer Segmentation
Email marketing automation allows you to effortlessly send the right messages to the right people. Use it to divide your customers into segments according to their place in the funnel, needs, team size or other significant factors.
Collect Feedback
Running polls on social media will never be as effective as getting into your user’s mailbox and asking “how we’re doing?”. Use email marketing to speak to a person, not to a crowd.
Drive Traffic
Email marketing is can be an endless source of traffic for your website and landing pages. If you struggle with getting people to read your blog posts or sign up for your webinars, try contacting your email list. These people already want to hear from you and are more likely to follow you where you guide them.
Valuable A/B testing
Email marketing can be a great way to trigger valuable A/B tests for a variety of things – from subject lines to landing pages and CTAs.
Over to You
Email marketing is a powerful tool in your SaaS growth kit. It can entirely change the way you grow your business by accelerating and automating processes. If you’re not yet making the most of it, make sure to change it – the results could be stunning!